Kaletam: Punadin Of Lordaeron

let's talk about the legality of this situation, first of all, just to kind of explain the specific situation that I was picturing when writing that in-universe meta post.

(obvious "I'm not a lawyer" disclaimer - somebody please correct me about things if I'm wrong. but also, remember that this movie was set in the late 90s, so modern laws don't necessarily apply to this)

(also when it comes to opinions, this is a nuanced issue so I am begging you to read this post all the way through if you intend to respond. I am not letting this be a piss on the poor situation here.)

in the USA, when you're under 18, your parents consent to things for you. medical treatment, education, religion, whatever - legally, that's how that works. in the movie's universe, Truman was adopted by a TV studio, and that studio decided on his behalf that it was okay for him to be lied to and to have his entire life broadcast 24/7 to the entire world.

legally speaking, what they did up until he was 18 might be considered okay. like in-universe, a 90s court might look at that and go "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I mean you were technically his parents and you wanted this for him, is it really any different from what happens to other child actors?" and decide that everything that happened when he was a kid is 100% fine and legal. Truman might not even have a claim on any money from the show's profits, because the Coogan Act wasn't updated until 2000, and there were a ton more ways to get around it before then.

is any of this...a good thing? would it feel fine then, in that world, for streaming services to have the show available, but only the parts where he was a kid?

I mean no, that's fucked up, but it is a possibility.

think of all the reality shows in real life where the child actors stopped participating once they were adults/had control over their own situations. there are tons of shows still available that feature footage of kids who as adults are probably not chill with having all of that out there. but their parents consented for them, and they don't have power in this situation.

so basically 1. hey is this fucked up? yes! but also 2. to a point, this is genuinely how it works in real life and it's so dark and terrible if you think about it for more than five seconds. I'm not even joking when I say that children are one of the largest oppressed classes.

moving on

with the parts of The Truman Show where he was over 18, it gets dicier, because then he's just an adult man that they're lying to and basically holding captive. but...what if the network thought about that, and prepared for it? honestly I would expect them to try and cover their asses with this, considering how deeply, ethically questionable all of this is.

Truman would have turned 18 in the mid-80s. could the TV studio find enough "evidence" to argue that Truman would have difficulty living on his own, or that him leaving his current scenario would be damaging to him, and so it would be better for him to stay under their control? would a mid-80s judge grant a TV studio a conservatorship over this incredibly sheltered, deeply profitable man?

in the universe of the movie, yeah, maybe. in a world where a TV studio can adopt a child, why wouldn't they be able to also do this? people are granted manipulative conservatorships like this over celebrities in real life. so sure, that possibly could have happened to Truman.

so now we're in the position of: hey this sucks everything sucks, Truman might not even be able to succeed in suing them if he tried. he might get a lot of "sucks to be you, what money are you even gonna pay your lawyers with?" and be told to kick rocks. and The Truman Show might remain available to watch everywhere, perfectly legally.

that's the situation I was imagining when I was writing the in-universe meta post. as a legal system and/or as a society, it was decided that The Truman Show was allowed to be available online, and that the network could still make money off of it. Truman may not have received any of the profits, and he might not have had a legal right to them at all. if he did, maybe due to laws changing since the show went off-air, that's something that he would have to deal with in court. or if there was money that he could come take ownership of (a Coogan account, or wages marked as unclaimed property, etc), there wouldn't necessarily be a way for him to do that and stay out of the public eye.

no matter what, he would be risking his hard-earned privacy if he were to try to do anything about what happened to him.

now we get to the questions that are interesting to me:

1. if the entire show was somehow deleted (from the network's servers, from legal streaming sites, from cable TV reruns), would that ultimately benefit Truman?

I don't know.

The Truman Show was broadcast 24/7 for a huge amount of his life. he's a part of the cultural zeitgeist. his existence was entertainment for millions worldwide, and for as long as he's alive (and well beyond that), people will remember him. he was a phenomenon. his face was one that everyone recognized, and that people parasocially felt familiar with. and that's not even mentioning all of the home video releases that would still exist (and yes, also the piracy sites, because nothing fully disappears online).

Truman's privacy was thoroughly violated, and he can never undo that. it's not possible. he can live a private life somewhere, rely on the people that were trying to fight for him, but even they would have seen his most intimate moments, his most difficult personal struggles, and the awkward stuff he did when he thought he was alone.

even if every recording of the show were to magically self-destruct overnight, would it really do that much for him? would Truman be able to live out his life in peace, not being recognized on the street or being hounded by people wanting to know what happened to him? would deleting everything keep him from being pointed at in grocery stores, hearing strangers talking about him, seeing articles about himself online?

even with the show deleted, could he ever be sure that anyone would really know him as a complete and independent person?

maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think he could ever escape it.

2. if the entire show was somehow deleted...would that benefit the network?

yeah, probably. I think it would. in my meta post, I honestly wasn't imagining the poster working on archival projects just for the sake of voyeuristically watching lost episodes. it can definitely be read that way, and for someone who grew up with the show, they would probably get some level of enjoyment out of it. but I don't think that would be their main motivation.

when older shows or movies go to streaming now, a lot of the time, they get edited. sometimes they change music for licensing reasons, sometimes they try to clean things up to be more (stupidly, excessively) "child-friendly", but they also remove things that could be considered "offensive".

honestly, I disagree with that practice. it's like what ducking-awkward was talking about above - I think it's important to preserve media as it was originally presented, even if parts of it were bad. we do ourselves a disservice by making squeaky-clean versions of things that had complicated pasts, especially when we do it to appease advertisers or otherwise make money off of it.

like uhhh think about the film White Christmas! very fun movie, a total classic! it also sucks the military's dick an absurd amount, and has a song that's hardcore nostalgic for minstrel shows, with a degree of racism that feels...unbelievable.

if we were to edit the movie to be less offensive to a modern audience, we would be misrepresenting it as a film. we need to be able to acknowledge that media in the past (even media that has good qualities!) had fucked up stuff in it, and then we need to sit with that discomfort. it's important, so that we can learn from it, and be aware of how much of the media being made right now is going to seem messed up in a couple decades as society progresses.

now sometimes older stuff on streaming gets a content note instead, but editing and censoring still happens, all the time. episodes go down, lines get changed and ADR'd. even old youtube videos (on popular/respected channels) can have parts cut out of them or changed, in a way where nobody would be able to tell that the original contained something objectionable.

in the universe of the film, The Truman Show started in the 60s and ran through the late 90s. if it was put on streaming services when those started getting big...what do you think they would edit out?

a corporate entity took a baby and subjected him to a manipulative social experiment, and recorded all of it for the world to see. when putting it online, would they leave in anything that might make the network seem...less than respectable? situations where someone should have stepped in to help him, but didn't? personal moments that would really highlight just how much they exploited him? there are lots of things that would have seemed okay in the 60s-90s but would have a general audience going, "hey...wait..." by the late 00s-20s.

in a world where that's the case, and where Truman's own personal wishes are unknown...would you be willing to convert old VHS tapes that someone recorded from live TV, to make sure you had all of the network's mistakes documented? to work so that, in case Truman ever wanted it, he could have evidence of everything that happened to him?

yeah, I think I might. I think I might do that. I'm not saying it's an 100% innocent choice to make, but I don't think anything is in life. and if I were in the exact same scenario as the fictional person I imagined in my meta post, I think I would probably do the same thing.

3. would historians want The Truman Show to be deleted?

probably not. I'm not one, so I can't speak for historians as a group, but if something was so culturally significant that it captivated the entire world for 30 years, it would be really important for us to have good records of it to understand...well, more about ourselves as a society.

why did people find this compelling? what about it drove people to obsess over it? why did it lead to such strong feelings of connection to a complete stranger trapped in a fictional town? what did people think about it, as a whole - did the majority of people approve of the network doing this? did people watch it like watching a car crash, out of morbid curiosity? what were the protests like, when it came to the group that was arguing that Truman should be told about his situation and given the choice to leave?

like, look...to compare it to a (very different but somewhat relevant) real-life scenario...would you delete all of Harry Potter?

I'm a trans person. I despise J. K. Rowling to my very core. if I could press a button that means she never makes another cent, I wouldn't even think, I would just do it. she's actively harming people, and using the power of her wealth to do it.

but would I delete all of Harry Potter? books, movies, video games, merch, etc. would I erase all of it?

no. I mean fuck, I lived through the popularity of this franchise, I know what things were like. HP was so culturally significant that if I did erase it, there would be huge gaps in future historians' knowledge of the 90s-10s. like it or not, historically, it's kind of important.

it shaped the way we look at media. it was a huge phenomenon the likes of which we might not ever see again in our lifetimes. and when people in the future are looking into what a horrible person J. K. Rowling is right now, what she's doing to attack people and how she's using her power for just...evil? they'd want to know the details of how she got that power. they'd want to understand how references to her media worked their way into pretty much everything else. how she was seen as progressive for so long, and how politicians and evangelicals called her books satanic. how fan communities formed and the drama that happened in them, how lives were changed and saved and ruined, legendary and beautiful fanfiction written and deleted, the spread of that horrible feeling when something you once loved was made by someone you now hate. fucking...snape wives. this may all seem stupid, but this is all a part of the big picture of understanding why and how people are the way that we are, and what we were like in that era.

that's what The Truman Show would be like, in the universe of the movie: media that affected the lives of millions, that made a lot of money for some truly horrible people, and something that can help us to understand what our horrifying, capitalistic, complicated human society is like, and why it's like that.

would you erase that from history? would it do any good to society if you did? I'm actually asking: what would you do with all of this?

it's just...it's something interesting to think about.

final thoughts:

okay, I'm done talking about The Truman Show. let's talk about real life

most states in the USA don't have legal protections for child actors. out of the ones that do, most of them don't have comprehensive legal protections for the kids working on reality TV shows, let alone for child youtubers, the children of influencers, etc.

for the kids in those situations now, would deleting all of their content make their lives better? would keeping it around provide evidence of the ways they've been mistreated? would historians want the media preserved, to look back on all of this and try to understand why we allowed this to happen in the first place?

I don't know. I really, truly, do not know.

I don't think there's a perfect answer to any of this, especially when so much damage has already been done. but it would be nice if, someday, we could protect children that are in these situations. not like any of these "protect the kids" laws that are blatant censorship and do nothing, but actual protections for kids who are being exploited, even and especially by people close to them, and who have legal control over them.

I still think about the kids who have their biggest tantrums memorialized online for all time, their teenage mistakes available for any future employer to find, reuploaded in tiktoks and reels and shorts and whatever else we'll end up inventing. kids who are tormented and harassed for the sake of "content", who might grow up and have to deal with everyone remembering their most mortifying moments, and who might not even have any claim to the money people made off of them without their consent.

we can't make stuff like that go away permanently, but we could regulate it, and help protect kids who become public figures. in 2024, California expanded the Coogan Act to include child social media content creators. other states could put these kinds of protections in place too, and this could change.